From thinking about time in the abstract, it’s natural to start treating it
as a resource, something to be bought and sold and used as efficiently as
possible, like coal or iron or any other raw material. Previously, laborers
had been paid for a vaguely defined “day’s work,” or on a piecework basis,
receiving a given sum per bale of hay or per slaughtered pig. But gradually
it became more common to be paid by the hour—and the factory owner
who used his workers’ hours efficiently, squeezing as much labor as
possible from each employee, stood to make a bigger profit than one who
didn’t. Indeed, some cantankerous industrialists came to feel that workers
who didn’t drive themselves hard enough were literally guilty of stealing
something. “I have by sundry people [been] horribly cheated,” fumed the
iron magnate Ambrose Crowley, from County Durham in England, in a
memo from the 1790s, announcing his new policy of deducting pay for time
spent “smoking, singing, reading of news history, contention, disputes,
anything foreign to my business [or] in any way loitering.” The way
Crowley saw it, his lackadaisical employees were thieves, illegitimately
helping themselves to containers from the conveyor belt of time.
You don’t need to believe, as Mumford sometimes seems to imply, that
the invention of the clock is solely to blame for all our time-related troubles
today. (And I certainly won’t be arguing for a return to the lifestyle of
medieval peasants.) But a threshold had been crossed. Before, time was just
the medium in which life unfolded, the stuff that life was made of.
Afterward, once “time” and “life” had been separated in most people’s
minds, time became a thing that you used—and it’s this shift that serves as
the precondition for all the uniquely modern ways in which we struggle
with time today. Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel
pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and
to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it. When you’re faced with
too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to
make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself
harder, or working for longer—as if you were a machine in the Industrial
Revolution—instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be
unreasonable. It grows alluring to try to multitask—that is, to use the same